Abstract
A great deal of discussion in the recent literature has been devoted to the so-called `McKinsey' paradox which purports to show that semantic externalism is incompatible with the sort of authoritative knowledge that we take ourselves to have of our own thought contents. In this paper I examine one influential epistemological response to this paradox which is due to Crispin Wright and Martin Davies. I argue that it fails to meet the challenge posed by McKinsey but that, if it is set within an externalist epistemology, it may have application to a related paradox that concerns the problem of radical scepticism.
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Pritchard, D. McKinsey Paradoxes, Radical Scepticism, and the Transmission of Knowledge across Known Entailments. Synthese 130, 279–302 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1014421800473
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1014421800473